A failure, but I know what went wrong

It's the cheesecake

Hello everyone. I am a 41 year old widower, who works full-time as a software developer. My wife passed away 3 months ago. I am trying to keep my spirits up, both as a goal in and of itself, and in order to maintain my productivity at close to its usual levels.

This blog will document my attempts to do that using various techniques. (You may immediately notice that the techniques I’m using at the moment don’t really seem to involve doing anything that I enjoy. That’s true to an extent, and I will experiment with those kinds of things in the future.)

However, it is worth mentioning at the outset that my mood variation would be highly diurnal in the absence of any deliberate interventions at the moment: on my worst days, my mood starts off not great, gets lower in the afternoon, and then becomes “normal” again after about 6pm - although at the start of this process of experimentation my mood was perhaps at its lowest in the early mornings.

As a bit of background on me, here are some factors which may or may not be relevant or make me “special”: I’m vegetarian - some weeks my diet is almost completely plant-based, while other weeks I consume eggs and milk - I don’t drink very often, and I suffer from a number of minor chronic health conditions.

I won’t be mentioning everything I eat, drink, take or do, but only the things that I think might be relevant. I keep a spreadsheet with more detailed data, so I may go back and edit posts to add more details that I later realise might be relevant.

The night before

11:00pm: Lime cheesecake, followed by 2g omega 3 fish oil

Slept 6h45m.

During the day

8am: 300mg Tru Niagen, 1000 IU Vitamin D, 0.2mg Vitamin K2, 1mg Vitamin B12, 5mg Lithium Orotate

Heating: Turned on electric heater in my room for additional heat after a while

Audio: Rain sounds (Note: In my judgement, my audio choices should be seen as more of an effect, rather than a cause, of my mood. Yes, even though they’re often nudged in certain directions by AI recommender systems on YouTube and Deezer.)

Mood: Not good - at one point, I actually cried, although I was confused and not sure why I was so sad.

After 6pm

Audio: Synthwave

Mood: Good, then excited as I come up with the idea of starting this blog

Observations

Wow, the difference in my body’s reliance on heat between the afternoon and the evening is, to me, astonishing. In the afternoon, I increased the heat in an attempt to stabilise my mood, even though it didn’t really help my mood sufficiently. In the evening, I turned off the electric heater and even forgot to put my sweater back on and left the window open wide - and still I didn’t experience any low mood - or even, for that matter, any uncomfortable chills!

As I’ve learned before I started this blog, the choice of which food to consume in the evening is really important. Clearly, lime cheesecake alone doesn’t work very well.

Me actually crying in the afternoon means I am recording this attempt to optimise my mood as a failure.

Of course, typically for me, when I was crying I didn’t realise it was a failure of my mood optimisation scheme - I thought I was just sad for valid reasons, even though I wasn’t sure what those reasons were.